Infamous: Second Son - 7 Reasons It's Sadly Not A System Seller

7. Seattle Feels Empty

Firstly we must admire the Seattle-based developers ambition for attempting to replicate their home city at such incredible detail. Anyone who has visited the city will appreciate the amazing little touches such as the inclusion of the gum wall and actual shops that exist on the streets. Hell, Sucker Punch even went to the amazing extreme of scanning the faces of real Seattle pedestrians to include in the game. All this is brilliant but unfortunately its all lost on the majority of people who have never visited the place. Sure the Space Needle is an iconic landmark but it seems truly bizarre, that in a game that has a huge focus on parkour climbing, you only get to climb it once as part of a story mission and it€™s impossible to jump off the top (which was always one of our favourite things to do in an inFAMOUS sandbox). Their just feels no substance to Seattle as an open world - it's missing that spark that makes gamers want to explore every nook and cranny (and the lack of side missions/collectibles only highlights this even more). While previous inFAMOUS games have been set in fictional cities whereby Sucker Punch have had the creative freedom to build a sandbox purely on what will be fun from a gameplay perspective, here they seem almost confined and limited by their ambition to recreate a real city. It€™s a shame as it€™s a pleasure exploring Seattle with neon super-speed but there never really feels like anything to do once the campaign has been completed. On a similar note the campaign also does a rather lacklustre job of showing you the whole city, considering several large areas of the map are barely ever used in the story and its left for you to actively go out and explore Seattle to its fullest.